Compared with November, this marks a drop of 2% for the IE browser, which a year ago had secured an 80% share of the browser market. Reasons for the drop are numerous: For one, a lot of users find it difficult to make friends with the new IE version and then there's the repeated appearance of security leaks in the MS browser. Microsoft has also lost points in the OS market. Current estimates label 89% of PC users as Windows users. In 2007, it was 92%, with Apple Mac OS X attracting for the first time 10% of users. (up from 6.5% last year). Net Application statistics put the growth of Linux users up from 0.45% to 0.85%.

With Google's announcement regarding the end of official support for IE 6, the drop in Microsoft's browser market shares is likely to continue over the next few months. Google is advising users to change to Firefox or Google Chrome. Experience shows that in similar cases, half of users migrate to Firefox without even considering the IE update.

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Market watcher Net Applications has found in their recent statistics that Microsoft's representation in operating systems has fallen to below 90% of the market. Meanwhile, Mozilla's Firefox is rising to a more than 20% share in the browser market.

If the newest statistics from Net Applications are to be believed, Google's Chrome browser has surpassed in market share Apple's KHTML engine-based Safari browser in December 2009 by a few tenths of a percentage point.

Following the legal action taken by Opera, Microsoft and the EU have agreed that a separate dialogue offering a choice of alternative browsers will appear by the installation of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.